Bioinspired Nacre‐Like Ceramic with Nickel Inclusions Fabricated by Electroless Plating and Spark Plasma Sintering
Abstract
Hybrid composites of layered brittle‐ductile constituents assembled in a brick‐and‐mortar architecture are promising for applications requiring high strength and toughness. Mostly, polymer mortars have been considered as the ductile layer in brick‐and‐mortar composites. However, low stiffness of polymers does not efficiently transfer the shear between hard ceramic bricks. Theoretical models point to metals as a more efficient mortar layer. However, infiltration of metals into ceramic scaffold is non‐trivial, given the low wetting between metals and ceramics. The authors report on an alternative approach to fabricate brick‐and‐mortar ceramic‐metal composites by using electroless plating of nickel (Ni) on alumina micro‐platelets, in which Ni‐coated micro‐platelets are subsequently aligned by a magnetic field, taking advantage of ferromagnetic properties of Ni. The assembled Ni‐coated ceramic scaffold is then sintered using spark plasma sintering (SPS) to locally create Ni mortar layers between ceramic platelets, as well as to sinter the ceramic micro‐platelets. The authors report on materials and mechanical properties of the fabricated composite. The results show that this approach is promising toward development of bioinspired ceramic‐metal composites.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jan 02, 2018
- Source ID
- 10.1002/adem.201700782
Entities
People
- Ali Behroozfar
- Arvind Agarwal
- Benjamin Boesl
- Brandon McWilliams
- Cheng Zhang
- Jiacheng Huang
- Majid Minary‐jolandan
- Soheil Daryadel
- Zhe Xu
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Dartmouth College
- Florida International University
- United States Army Research Laboratory
- University of Texas at Dallas